Bill Nichols, a retired sports writer at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland who went on to teach university classes in sports media, has been selected to receive the Jake Wade Award by the College Sports Information Directors of America.
He will receive his award at the organization's Awards Dinner on Wednesday, June 30 at the CoSIDA Workshop to be held in Calgary, Alberta.
The Jake Wade Award is named in honor of Julius Jennings Wade, a longtime sports writer and sports information director at North Carolina. Given annually since 1958, the award is presented to an individual or organization that has made an outstanding contribution in the media to the field of intercollegiate athletics.
Nichols worked at The Plain Dealer between 1963 and 1993. While there, he was a strong advocate for the coverage of small colleges in the Cleveland metropolitan and Ohio areas, instituting a regular column for those schools in the paper, which was dominated by coverage of professional sports.
He also worked at the Baldwin-Wallace Night Times, and at Westlake Ohio West Life. Nichols was the official scorer at Cleveland Indians games between 1996 and 2002, and founded the softball program at Notre Dame College in Ohio.
Nichols has been a contributing writer to The Sporting News, Street & Smith's publications, Football Digest, AAU Magazine, Golf World, Tennis Magazine and various Host Communications projects for the NCAA.
His list of awards is impressive and includes 1981 awards from the Cleveland Press Club and the Akron Press Club, and a 1987 award from the Associated Press. He was the 1988 Western Tennis Association Writer of the Year and the 1988 Ohio Track Writer of the Year.
Although retired from the newspaper business, Nichols has continued to touch the lives of a number of aspiring journalists and athletics administration students in the Cleveland area. A number of his students have gone on to careers in sports writing and sports information.
Since 1994, he has taught classes in sports media at various campuses and has written a textbook on the subject. Nichols has also written a book on the history of football at Baldwin-Wallace College, one of the top programs in Division III.
Nichols is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College and earned a master's from Kent State. He and his wife, Jean, have two children.